John F. Kennedy’s white hearse to be sold at auction

The hearse that carried President John F. Kennedy will go on auction Saturday. (AP file)

A car auction company says it will put President John F. Kennedy’s white hearse on the block during an event in Scottsdale, Arizona, this week, Consumer Reports wrote.

According to auctioneers Barrett-Jackson, the 1964 Cadillac Hearse transported the assassinated president from Parkland Memorial Hospital to Love Field Airport in Dallas. Its authenticity has been verified by members of the Professional Car Society and its owners at Dallas’ O’Neal Funeral Home.

From the story:

Don McElroy was a new employee at O’Neal Funeral Home that fateful Friday, November 22, 1963, when the call came in to bring a casket and hearse to the hospital. Just 24 years old, McElroy helped move President Kennedy’s body to the vehicle and pulled down a rear seat for Jacqueline Kennedy so she could sit near her husband.

“The Secret Service drove the president to Love Field,” McElroy said, explaining that the O’Neal staff was not allowed to be in the hearse en route to Air Force One. “After they got the president and first lady onto the plane, they just left the hearse at Love Field. It took Vernon O’Neal four hours to find the Cadillac at the airport.”

The hearse was the first 1964 model built by Miller-Meteor Company of Ohio, body number 64001. It was the show car of the National Funeral Directors Association convention, where funeral home director Vernon O’Neal purchased it in October, 1963, just one month before the assassination.

Steve Lichtman of the Professional Car Society (PCS) says that he and other members of PCS are almost 100 percent convinced that the hearse is authentic.

This is a strong endorsement from the participants of the international club dedicated to car preservation and restoration. Last year, Lichtman and others in PCS debunked the Barrett-Jackson auction claim that the company had the ambulance that carried President Kennedy from Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. As counter evidence, they presented a 1986 photograph of the ambulance in a Boston junkyard crusher, provided by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum.